A development blog of what Con Kolivas is doing with code at the moment with the emphasis on linux kernel, BFS and -ck.

Saturday, 13 October 2012

The vicissitudes of life

七転八起

I realise in this world there are people with far worse tragedies and far worse issues to deal with than my own so I've been reluctant to make a big deal of my own issues online, even though I have a mildly public persona. However I've been touched by the many warm wishes people have sent me over the last month when I mentioned that I had a family tragedy to deal with which was keeping me offline, despite the fact most of you did not even know what it was.

While I usually prefer to keep my private life separate from my online life, many of you have asked what it was that was so traumatic. Initially it was very difficult to talk about but now I find it somewhat helpful to speak about.

I'm from a family that has always been very close and I have two older brothers. On the Australian Father's day, 2nd September, my eldest brother George, who is the father of two himself, was involved in a motor vehicle accident which gave him critical head injuries. Unfortunately he has been left with massive brain damage with very little prospect of recovery. He also had asked me many years previously to be his enduring power of attorney. Over the last month I have had to deal with the grief of his (effective) loss, been the medical contact for the family since I'm the only doctor in the family, deal with issues of choices to do with end-of-life decision making versus potential life in a vegetative state, support for various people affected by this tragedy, dealing with lawyers, financial institutions, credit card companies, utilities, gaining access to email, work authorities, insurance bodies and so on. The "system" does not seem well set up to take over someone's life if they're indefinitely incapacitated.

I don't really wish to go into any greater detail about this online, but suffice to say it has been the worst month of my life and I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemies.

And yes, my parents are still alive, and they are, without doubt, taking this the hardest.

The only good news, I guess, is that I'm working towards what I call the "new normal" in my life. I'll be hacking on BFS and -ck again fairly soon.

After reading your post, I actually felt saddened as if listening from someone, in person.Considering I only know you as someone whose C code helps my OS experience, I find this fascinating.I almost felt like I would like to be your friend in this very moment to support and comfort you.Thanks for your continued work.

Thank you for sharing a glimpse into the darkness in which you and your family have been mired. I too went through a significant loss early on in my life and as you said, found some sort of release in sharing/talking as I dealt with it. It is strangely cathartic. My warm wishes are with you.

For those who do now know to, or for those who are too lazy to, I plugged the kanji into the wikitonary. It is quite poetic.

We all have heroes and there are many in the FOSS community, we users tend to believe those that are most influential live perfect lives dealing just with difficult programming task and frequent "I made it" statements, unfortunately is not the case.I just knew about you because I use the product of your work everyday and today a friend at the forum posted about this and I felt the need to tell you that even if I can't do anything about it I still can read it and felt for you. I hope time heals the pain of all your family soon. I don't know if you are a religious person but I think only something bigger than us can help to endure the death of a son, I wish to your parents the strength of spirit and resignation needed to deal with this.

I don't know if condolence is the right word. If I read your words correctly, he, your brother is still alive?! So, he'll have a chance. I include your family into my prayers (though I'm not religious, I practice praying to some greater "one" usually) and wish for the best for all of your family!

Your "Online-Community" is with you, too!

Best hopes, Manuel Krause

P.S.: Your -ck1 for 3.6 compiled fine and is up and running with 3.6.2 on here. Thank you!

Hi Con,Your 3.5-sched-bfs-425.patch is great for linux-3.6.2 !Thank you very much!

Also me and some other users knew that it needs not that many changes to adapt Bfs to linux-3.6 - nobody of us was able to do find the correct places to do the needed changes :(We need you doing this :) And we all are happy about you coming to normal life again!

Many greeting from Hamburg in Germany,Ralph Ulrich

PS: Did you read this story about numa scheduling:https://lwn.net/Articles/518329/

[Offtopic]Maybe this doesn't fit in here very well, now. But I know you guys/girls beeing affected by low latency desktop experience and maybe someone of you can help me out.Maybe you know that my machine is very old and is cheaper to replace than to discuss about.

My actual problem I search a solution for is: I have unpredictable audio stuttering when playing .avi video in SMPlayer and also in VLC. It happens every 6 to 15 min, is not file dependant and so not reproducible and understandable by rational means.

Yesterday I tried to remove pulseaudio within my openSUSE 12.2, but that didn't help much. Seems like too many other packages depend on some remaining pulseaudio libs. Now I have a half alsa / half pulse setup, I assume. So I've got at least one typical time related error message from VLC message log: alsa warning: broken pipe... (and then resyncing, what works).

From former kernels in former days I know there were many enhancement guides flying around the web in order to enhance the audio.

[Offtopic]Manuel change you distribution! That SUSE is a place of chaos the last months! With you old hardware give Gentoo a chance! I will see you there at forums.gentoo.org as manuSomething?Ralph Ulrich

Thank you both very much for your replies!New weekend, new spare time to test & fiddle around ^^ ;-)

@Ralph: I'm almost married with openSUSE for years now, I don't want to risk anything more at this point.

@Mike: I experienced many weird things when trying to apply your settings (and also setting them in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf) in steps of decreasing your horribly high values -- including KDE at first not starting i.e. locking up. Then "emulating" these settings by rescheduling with appropriate schedtool settings after startup I at least got better results in SMPlayer.But it seems like the VLC pulse audio output plugin is still not working correctly.

Can you both -- or all other readers -- imagine kernel options that may cause audio dropouts? Perhaps wrong choices of timer/clock components like RTC, enhanced RTC, HPET etc. ?

that's are not my values, I only use it (got it from here: http://forums.opensuse.org/applications/multimedia/400774-pulseaudio-cant-get-realtime-high-priority-permissions.html). Could be, that the memlock value is a little bit high, maybe you could leave it. But these values are limits. At the moment, pulseaudio runs here on all my machines with nice -11 and realtime 5 (as defined in the original /etc/pulse/daemon.conf). Check it as user with cmd 'pulseaudio -vvv'.

Important, pulseaudio should run as user deamon, not system deamon!!

Btw. all my machines are using these values on 64bit OpenSuse 11.2 with KDE (4.9.2 or 4.8.x, ok my old Dell X200 with Pentium M and 640MB Ram is on 32bit LXDE, but this is for testing only :) ). No problem with standard OpenSuse kernel and with my default ZEN (BFS, BFQ and other tweaks) kernel.

My player choice depends on the hardware, sometimes smplayer ist better, some times vlc, and sometimes even Kaffeine ;) Depends on graphics card. But there are no sound drop outs at all (besides on vlc over hdmi with onboard chipset radeon DKMS driver on one machine, but that's because I tried to pimp the cheapy speakers in my monitor with some pulseaudio equalizer settings :)

Btw, all my HPET settings are on.

Regards MikeCY sysitos.

PS: I think, if you have further questions, we could email this, or there are more OpenSuse users on Con's blog? ;)

Hi Mike, and all readers,just want to report back on this offtopic topic. Only adjusting the priorities did not help.Second of all I spent much time on reinvestigating the web-pages regarding pulseaudio and realtime audio & s.o. (Quite an Odyssee!)That leaded back to reenabling some RTC related options within kernel config (that I'd thrown away before, in order to have a more "lean" kernel setup).As these re-added options didn't show a complete relief regarding audio dropouts (smplayer) I went back to my PCI Chipset tuning settings. And I've found a solution for my chipset finally.

hi, i have trouble with 3.6-ck1 and 3.6.2 this is the log:perf_event_intel PEBS disabled due to cpu errata SMP boot cpu 1,the system hang at this line,no way to boot system i have used aufs and ck patch,with only aufs the system boot without problem,

CK, first of all, I wanted to tell you that you have a lot of well wishers. Me and my family will be praying for you and your family to recover from this tragedy. And thank you for all of your time and efforts you have put into -ck.